Thursday, November 01, 2007

Giving Christians a Bad Name

I'm hopping mad this morning. On my way to work I heard about this and nearly lost it. I have talked before about how frustrating it is to be a liberal Christian. How infuriating it is to have your religion appropriated by people who corrupt it for their own political means. How heartbreaking it is to have such a wonderful message distorted into something that is a source of hate and divisiveness. The very idea that "Christians" are tormenting the families of our fallen military dead in order to promote an anti-gay message is incomprehensible to me. How can anyone honestly think that is acceptable behavior? I wonder what would happen if people started protesting at all funerals of people connected to Westboro Baptist Church. To the members of that church, I have one thing to say: "SHAME ON YOU!" Even if you are not one of the graveside protestors, by allowing your fellow church members to engage in such un-Christian and shameful behavior makes you complicit. The families of these fallen military servicepeople have suffered enough. Take your hate agenda somewhere else! It has no place in Christianity.

4 comments:

Gary said...

This is terrible. I really don't know what to do when dealing with hateful people. I certainly feel sorry for them because they're clearly not happy with their own lives or anything around them.

But just feeling sorry isn't enough. I know you have to do something about it, too. I've thought about this a lot, but I've never been able to find anything to combat bigotry (in all of its forms) that works for me. If anyone has suggestions, I'm listening.

Amy M. said...

I hear you, Gary. Stuff like this makes me feel a kind of impotence. First of all, you can't reason with irrational people. So, what do you do? I think Christians have to speak up and say they will not allow stuff like this to be done "in our name."

Unknown said...

These people make me so angry! They like to protest at any funeral where there will be media attention--they wanted to go to the funeral of the Amish girls who were killed a year or two ago, but I'm not sure what happened.

But there is good news: a soldier's family won a $11.9 million judgment against Fred Phelps!

http://www.peskyapostrophe.com/index.php/weblog/apparently_god_does_not_hate_fags/

Bookfool said...

I hadn't heard about that. Wow, how totally depressing. I can't imagine what makes anyone think they know exactly what God is thinking.